Sven's life in Oz

Well, long-suffering readers, I am delighted to announce the end of the saga that is my journey though Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina. Spoilers ahead so if you don’t want to know what happens (or if you just don’t care, which is more likely) then press here for something else to read.

Part seven moves at a reasonable pace, and for the first and only time, Levin and Anna meet. They get on famously and go their own ways. Tolstoy gives us this one chance to see that they are the same, but on very different paths. After this, Anna becomes unhinged and we see the inevitable decline of her relationship with Vronsky, not through any wrongdoing by either part, but largely through Anna’s jealousy of Vronsky and his freedom, and their not being able to properly understand one another. There’s also an unfortunate mix-up with some letters they send between one another and this leads eventually to Anna throwing herself under a train. Anna seems quite mad at points and Tolstoy writes this mental breakdown particularly well. (He did this with Levin in Part six while Kitty was in labour and I remember I was impressed with it then, too.) But when Anna finally kills herself it is calm, measured and almost sensible. It is beautifully written and seems like more of a fulfillment of her life than the ghastly end it most certainly would have been in reality.

Part eight does starts two months after Anna’s suicide, so we don’t have to deal with funerals and weeping and assigning blame, which in this novel would easily add a further one hundred pages to its length. Instead we learn that Vronsky is off to fight the Turks in Serbia (the only thing that will keep him from suicidal grief over Anna) and he promptly drops out of the novel. The final part is almost entirely filled with Levin’s finding faith. I confess at the time I was disappointed with this: he has spent the entire novel as an ‘enlightened non-believer’ and his turn around at the end was a bit of a let down. BUt reveiwing it now I think it is actually quite a nice way to end.

In a nutshell, his book on farming is published, is not well-received and eventually reviewed with derision. He feels his whole life is a failure and flips between living for the sake of his family and killing himself. (Life is cheap in Tolstoy’s writing, especially when it’s your own.) Whilst out wondering what his life means, he stumbles across a peasant who tells him that he should live for God and not for his own profit, and that seems to turn him around. All of a sudden he sees that his life is “not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it”. Levin does not go so far as to believe in God, but he does have faith in something greater than himself and decides that he should do good works for their own sake, rather than to bring reward or meaning to his own life.

Throughout the novel Tolstoy has used Anna’s love for Vronsky and Levin’s love for farming as comparable tales of a relationship that society cannot understand or condone. Anna’s love is all about the self and ends up destroying both her and Vronsky; Levin’s is totally selfless and though it too nearly kills him, he ends up realising that there are bigger things than the individual and lives happily ever after. Although I am pleased I read it, I’m not sure I enjoyed it as much as I hoped. The writing on the whole is excellent – particularly the way I have very clear images of each character, though Tolstoy does not describe their physical attributes at all in the novel (save through the mouths of characters as required). I’ve mentioned several times that the story with Anna is compelling, but I found the reports of farming as dull in this novel as the history of whaling in Moby Dick.

846 pages to tell me that a good deed is its own reward. I think it was worth it in the end.  You may not.

Compared to the previous five parts, I tore through part six.  The final three parts seem much shorter, as though we are entering the final sprint and the flags of the finish line are fluttering just over the brow of the literary hill.  What happens in part six? Not much and quite a lot all at the same time.

Levin and Kitty have friends to stay in the country and two of them fall in love with each other (Sergei and Varenka) but, as is the way of this novel, they don’t end up getting together because they are spiritual people with a lot of baggage like dead wives and saintliness.  Levin takes some of the men hunting and has a crap time.  He also gets jealous of a handsome young man eyeing up his wife and throws him out of the house.  This is all designed to show how Levin is more responsible than the rest of the carefree Russian aristocracy and it works quite well; I would say this is the most interesting Levin has been since the start of the novel.

Meanwhile, Anna and Vronsky are living in sin in the country.  Vronsky has set himself up as a landlord, local official and all-round philanthropist, and Anna is voraciously reading everything she can lay her hands on and generally supporting her man.  They are both under a considerable strain as the resentment for their pariah status continues to simmer under the surface and gnaw away at their relationship.  By the end of part six they have decided that, finally, Anna will get a divorce so they can be married and return to polite society.  Tolstoy does use Anna and Dolly (who comes to visit) to explore the experience of women in society at the time: Dolly, in a marriage where her husband does not love her, is envious of Anna who seems so free.  Anna, in turn, is entirely trapped by what she has done and completely tied to Vronsky for survival.  Also, it turns out she is infertile after her near-death experience in part four which is a little cruel of Tolstoy: a liberated woman becomes a bad mother and barren to boot.  Judgemental much?

Only two more parts to go and then I think I’ll start something a bit lighter.  “Pride and prejudice and zombies“, perhaps.  It looks like fun.

If it seems to you like I’ve been reading this book forever, it’s because I have. 800 pages of Tolstoy is not something to read quickly, and with a full time job and a social life as well, it really doesn’t lend itself to hit-and-run reading. I soldier on, nonetheless, partly because I’m now down to the final 300 pages and the final sentence is tantalisingly close (even though two people have now told me how it ends), and partly out of sheer bloody-mindedness that I will not be beaten by this mother-effing book. (Spoilers ahead: read on at your peril.)

Parts Four and Five have been the most entertaining of the novel to date, and I shall tell you for why: things happened. Part Four moved at a cracking pace – it is considerably shorter than the previous three – and by the end of it I felt reinvigorated and ready to read on. There was divorce, there was birth and potentially a death; even though Tolstoy commanded events to cancel one another out and leave us with a status quo that does not advance the plot one iota, it was still all rather exciting. (Karenina’s near death was especially thrilling – never have I wanted anyone to die like I wanted her to slip out of this novel.) At the end of Part Four, Anna and Vronsky decide that they have had enough and run off to the country together – her still married and leaving behind her son: him giving up his job in the army. Both leave behind something they love for one another, and yet another thread in the unending tale of this disaster is unpicked.

Part Five sees Levin finally manage to get Kitty down the aisle and up the duff. Sadly his brother dies on somewhere around the middle but not before we have had several pages of description of his final days, at the end of which he passes on without so much as a final word. There is a great line in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin where one of the central characters “had planned his dying words for years and left them all unsaid”, but at least he went out with a house falling on his head, which more than makes up for the lack of epigram. No such luck in Tolstoy’s realist epic (if such a term is not a contradiction in and of itself) – you just linger on for days with consumption and then die. Life is tough.

I actually had a lot of time for realism when I was younger, and spent a not inconsiderable part of my university life studying the works of Emile Zola – a writer in the naturalist style, a derivative of the realist movement – critically assessing why it didn’t last very long as a pure theatrical medium; and where along the way it was usurped by voyeurism masquerading as entertainment. Nonetheless, be under no illusions: it may be technically interesting and the characters may be exquisite, but it’s a long hard slog and, like life, it ends in disappointment.

Elsewhere in Part Five, Karenin acquires a new “wife” in the shape of Countess Ivanovna, who tells Anna’s son that his mother is dead; she’s a charming woman. Anna and Vronsky return from the country to discover that all of Russian society despises them for being so fast and loose with their morals. Anna, still married and cavorting with another man, is snubbed vocally by friends at the opera. By today’s standards it’s not much but in Tsarist Russia, it’s a big deal. Anna manages to break into her husband’s house and see her son briefly, proving reports of her death greatly exaggerated and no doubt putting the poor bugger in therapy for the rest of his life. In the end, the outcast lovers accept that they burned their societal bridges and, having nowhere else to go, head out into Tolstoy’s wilderness: the country.

It may seem like they are simply on elastic, pinging back and forth between rural and urban life, but I think it’s interesting that Tolstoy juxtaposes town and country as social standards, and the contrast between Levin and Anna – each wanting to live in one and being dragged unwillingly into the other – is quite cleverly done. It doesn’t make Levin more interesting, sadly, but the emerging dichotomy is lovely.

On to Part Six!

There are all manner of excuses for taking so long to plough through Part 3, but the most honest answer to that question would be: “it was boring”. I find as I go on that Levin’s story becomes more interesting, but the time taken to tell it seems gratuitous and indulgent.Yes, Levin’s love for farming is socially unacceptable, just like Anna’s love for Vronsky, but can’t you sum it up succinctly ? Perhaps I am too used to being told what to think in a novel – throughout, he does seem to engage in a certain “to and fro” that feels like, at some points, he is unsure of the validity of his argument and needs to hash it out on paper before continuing – but I simply find Levin too tedious to engage. Maybe I don’t know enough about late nineteenth-century Russia, perhaps I don’t understand the mind-set of the Tsarist aristocracy, maybe, indeed, I am an idiot; but I assert my right as the reader to say “I don’t care about your farming dilemma: get on with it already.”

The problem I am having with the novel should have been apparent from the beginning: it is just too long. You don’t have to open the book to work that out. There is a lot of stuff in there, but given the extremely small cast of characters (there are only seven main characters – in a book that comes out at over 800 pages, that’s very few indeed) that’s a lot of room for what is essentially a naturalistic study of their fates. After a (relatively) high-powered start to the tale, where characters and relationships were constructed, conflict established and a certain degree of intrigue kept you going, Part 3 seems to slowly trudge its way to Part 4 and all I want to do is shake Levin hard. He won’t go to Kitty (to whom he proposed and was rejected) because he is too proud, essentially. He wants to run away and live the life of his peasant workers, but he is too scared? Proud? I don’t even know why he doesn’t run off and become a muzhik, but it’s something to do with his love for Kitty, whom we have already established he will never re-approach. His indecisive limbo, his whining introspection and his constant misery make him easily one of the most frustrating characters in the novel. Oh, and his dying brother shows up at the end of Part 3 and puts him into nihilistic decline, so he’s going to be a barrel of laughs in Part 4.

In other news, Anna Karenina (remember her? She’s the eponymous anti-heroine) gets a response from her husband, to whom she had confessed her affair with Vronsky in Part 2. (Vronsky was the bounder who lead Kitty on, causing her to refuse the proposal from Levin, who is best friends with Anna’s brother. All clear? Good.) He mulls over his options in one of the most engaging passages of the novel so far, wondering whether letting her run away with him would give her a victory. He considers all his options – a duel, a divorce, or simply walking away and concludes that he will not let her be “united with Vronsky unhindered, that her crime be profitable for her.”

”That feeling of jealousy…had been replaced by another: the wish not only that she not triumph, but that she be paid back for her crime. [...] Alexei Alexandrovich became convinced that there was only one solution: to keep her with him, concealing what had happened from society, and taking all possible measures to stop their affair and above all – something he did not admit to himself – to punish her.”

Eschewing his own chance for happiness, Alexandrovich chooses to devote his life to the punishment of his wayward wife by carrying on as normal. Tolstoy has, until now, portrayed Karenina’s husband as lacking in emotion, but self-immolation in pursuit of a vendetta betrays all this and gives him an edge that I find compelling. Who hasn’t thought about doing the same thing? Eventually sense gives way, but for those few moments, it seems the most cruel – and satisfying – thing to do. Alexandrovich has become my favourite character in the book.

Anna and Vronsky meet in secret after Alexei reveals his masterplan of a sham marriage, and nothing much really happens. Vronsky is still keen on them running off together, Anna says she will have to wait and see who gets custody of her son, but the strain and the differences of perception about their situation are well written; you come away with the feeling that they are both beginning to see that they are flogging a dead horse. Interestingly, Vronsky also considers the prospect of a duel, and I wonder if this is how the horse race allegory fulfills itself.

Aside from that, Kitty Scherbatsky is still at large and stirring it up in the background, appearing at inopportune moments to remind Levin that he’s a lovesick fool, but her story doesn’t really move forward. It makes you wonder how big a country Russia really is when the same folk bump into one another over and over again, but who am I to question the author? I’ve never even been to Russia.

I’ve raced through part two in record time (given the density of the prose), thanks in part to my locking myself out of the house one evening while James was at rugby practice. I spent four hours in the local pub with a couple of glasses of wine and nothing but Anna Karenina for company: you’d be surprised how much you can read when you can’t do anything else.

The plot is thickening up quite nicely: Anna is turning out to be slightly nuts. There’s a rather nice allegory for the Vronsky-Anna-Karenin love triangle as a horse race: this being Russian literature I assume the foreshadowing is accurate, because it does not end well. At the end of part two, Anna has come clean to her husband, and we wait to see how he will react.

Kitty Scherbatsky’s trip to Germany is an excellent exposition of how one gets over a broken heart: rebounding (in this case, onto another woman, Varenka, in a platonic sense) and trying to change yourself to correct the mistakes you think you made, then realising that you aren’t being yourself, and calling it off. This little tale also points out the naiveté that Kitty, and to a larger extent Anna, suffer in not being able to see that people are not always what they seem.

Finally, Levin is trucking along but honestly, I find his parts hard going. Levin’s talks on farming put me in mind of the explanations of whaling in Moby Dick: sometimes it feels like wading through treacle. That said, Levin does express particular views on artistocracy and social status which, by the way they are written, I imagine are Tolstoy’s own.

Part two seems to pick up the pace and the plot seems to be tightening up, as compared to part one where there seemed to be a lot going on and I found it hard to keep a track of the different characters, their relationships and their failings (everyone is flawed, after all: this is Tolstoy).

Favourite quotes:

Levin on the aristocracy:
“You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don’t…I consider myself an aristocrat and people like myself, who can point to three or four generations in their families’ past, who had a degree of education (talent and intelligence are another thing), and who never lowered themselves before anyone, as my father lived, and my grandfather.”

On Anna’s son and his perspective in their affair:
“This child with is naïve outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.”

Kitty and her father on The Stahls’ angel-like qualities:
“‘Oh, no, papa!’ Kitty protested hotly. ‘Varenka adores her. And besides, she does so much good! Ask anybody you like! Everybody knows about her and Aline Stahl.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, pressing her arms with his elbow. ‘But it’s better to do it so that, if you ask, nobody knows.’”

Part Three starts tomorrow. More in 120 pages time.